


A different kind of

by SomeTorist



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Plot What Plot, otp: Tony/feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-12
Updated: 2012-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-07 15:06:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/432479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SomeTorist/pseuds/SomeTorist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anthony Howard Stark is not a writer, not a genius, not a wizard; he's not like his mother and he's not like his father.</p><p>...And yet-- of course he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A different kind of

Once, in what still now feels like another life, Tony briefly considered becoming a writer.  After years of no responses to “Daddy?  Daddy, look what I made!” and breakfasts with only one parent and one open newspaper, on a Tuesday morning like every other, Tony Stark decided that he didn’t want to be like his father.

For an eleven-year-old boy with a mind like Tony’s, that kind of self-recognition felt life-changing.

He didn’t want to be so self-engrossed that he would walk blindly past his son at nine o’clock at night.  He didn’t want to be so lost that he’d spend every hour of every weekend locked in a workshop, going days without eating.  He didn’t want to spontaneously start talking in a language that only other men in white coats with fancy glasses could understand.  He didn’t want to be like Howard Stark.

He wanted to be like Maria Stark.

And even at age eleven, Tony insisted that his mother tuck him in with fantastic tales of soldiers and sprites and heroic deaths and happy endings.  Every night, he fell asleep with magic floating in through his ears and candy-coating his dreams, and one day when he was eleven, he thought that he would rather candy-coat someone else’s dreams than become anything like his father.

He sat at his little writing desk for hours on end, willing words to appear on the page.  Tony wanted to create something beautiful; the need to _create_ and to weave and to paint sometimes felt like it was all bursting out of him, like the seams at his side were about to break, like he was on the brink of explosion.  He could feel words bumping against his closed lips from the inside of his mouth, could feel his fingers twitching with unused magic, but he couldn’t will the pencil to move.  The furthest Tony ever got in writing his own story: _“Once, there was a bird who lived in a tower, and he wanted to fly.  He tried”_

And whenever Tony brought a sheet of empty paper to his mother with tears threatening to spill down his cheeks, blessed Maria Stark would smile gently and pull him towards her, wrapping her arms around him like she had wrapped him in stories for eleven years, and she would kiss the top of his head, sometimes whispering, _“It will come if it’s meant to, hiijo.”_

...And then at age twelve, Tony Stark wrote and wrote and wrote and couldn’t stop writing.  But it wasn’t a magical story like his mother’s had been.  This one was grittier and painful and it was real.

At age twelve, Tony wrote of a ghost who wasn’t always a ghost; a ghost that could read minds and play jumprope and who wore glasses when she read.  At age twelve, Tony wrote of a ghost who faded with the sunset, a ghost whose greatest tragedy was that she could no longer touch the skin of her goldfish or the sand on a beach or the face of her son.  At age twelve, Tony finally wrote a story -- his first story; his last story -- and he laid his packet of pages at the feet of a small tombstone, walking from the graveyard next to a Howard Stark he didn’t want to become, and Tony could still feel the burn of magic in his fingertips but he couldn’t even _look_ at a pencil without feeling like the canyon of his heart was crumbling.

He slowly started writing again, but this isn’t magic; this is writing in code.  In HTML and the base language of his metal creations, Tony feels like he can build a whole world-- a world of his design; a world where every bird can fly and every ghost can feel sand between her toes.  He still can’t will the pencil to move, but Tony Stark can type like hell, and sometimes the pressure inside him -- that exploding, words-spilling-from-a-mouth kind of pressure -- lessens when he wields a blowtorch or codes a new program or creates the first fully functional Artificial Intelligence unit and names it after Maria Stark’s first boyfriend.

His father wouldn’t have liked that much.

And it’s always a quiet war of explosions inside Tony Stark-- the need to be like his mother vs. the inevitability of becoming his father.  Tony Stark, the insane, insomniatic contradiction, who calls himself a philanthropist like a confession but uses the word as a weapon; who withdraws to a workshop and stays there for days on end because he refuses to be a burden and because he knows that he’s loudest when he’s absent; who loves dogs but builds robots instead, ostensibly because robots are smarter, but really because he would never trust himself with a cocker spaniel when he can barely take care of himself; who treats his own rare, real moments of genius disparagingly because he needs someone to tell him that he’s brilliant.

It’s occurred to him many times, this realization that he’s living his life sprinting after the hope of true creation, of taking someone’s breath away, but it’s occurred too frequently to matter.  Seventy-eight percent of the time, Tony leaves his workshop or a project or a failure with an acrid taste in his mouth, like he’s wrung out and sore and like he’s been pushed to the brink but not far enough, and there’s still a weight in his gut like he should’ve tried harder, if only he’d tried harder.  Howard Stark had taught his son about the importance of appearances, though, in a way he probably hadn’t meant to: do it do it do it, whatever it is, and don’t let them see how much it costs.  Smile for the cameras and shake strangers’ hands and grin like that seventy-eight percent was all entirely planned because they don’t know any better, and maybe that shit-eating smirk of confidence will eventually seep through the cracks and actually bring you four seconds of peace.

And it’s not magic, but there are moments -- few and far between moments; less than a quarter of the remaining twenty-two percent of the time -- when Tony finally feels like he’s writing like he’s meant to, like he’s part of a tapestry that he is in the process of creating, woven into the ink of an unpenned story living outside the realm where physical paper and pencil are necessary.  There’s still sometimes the burn of magic in his fingertips, of something pushing to get free of his lips, but he spends hours in his workshop and goes days without eating and loses himself in conversations with some of the world’s best minds, having long ago forfeit the fight against his middle name.  

And despite all of it, he always wakes suddenly, with the makings of happiness at the corner of his mouth; instead of a candy-coated dream, he got a real-life nightmare that’s inexplicably created a shock red metal suit with gold panels like a race car but _better_ , a team so crazy that he trusts them with more than his life, a pseudo- internal peace that’s lasted longer than four seconds, and maybe this electric blue kind of magic is better than taking a stranger’s breath away with the strength of some false truths inked on a page; maybe all of this is better.


End file.
